Empire and Colonialism: Rich Men in London Still Deciding Africa’s Future

Some £600 million in UK aid
money courtesy of the taxpayer is helping big business increase its
profits in Africa via the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition.
In return for receiving aid money and corporate investment, African
countries have to change their laws, making it easier for corporations
to acquire farmland, control seed supplies and export produce.

Last year, Director of the Global Justice Now Nick Dearden said:

“It’s scandalous that UK aid money is being used to carve
up Africa in the interests of big business. This is the exact opposite
of what is needed, which is support to small-scale farmers and fairer
distribution of land and resources to give African countries more
control over their food systems. Africa can produce enough food to feed
its people. The problem is that our food system is geared to the luxury
tastes of the richest, not the needs of ordinary people. Here the
British government is using aid money to make the problem even worse.”

Ethiopia, Ghana, Tanzania, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Mozambique,
Nigeria, Benin, Malawi and Senegal are all involved in the New Alliance.

In a January 2015 piece in The Guardian,
Dearden continued by saying that development was once regarded as a
process of breaking with colonial exploitation and transferring power
over resources from the ‘first’ to the ‘third world’, involving a
revolutionary struggle over the world’s resources. However, the current
paradigm is based on the assumption that developing countries need to
adopt neo-liberal policies and that public money in the guise of aid
should facilitate this. The notion of ‘development’ has become hijacked
by rich corporations and the concept of poverty depoliticised and
separated from structurally embedded power relations.

To see this in action, we need
look no further to a conference held on Monday 23 March in London,
organised by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the United
States Agency for International Development (USAID). This secretive,
invitation-only meeting with aid donors and big seed companies discussed
a strategy to make it easier for these companies to sell patented seeds
in Africa and thus increase corporate control of seeds.

Farmers have for generations been saving and exchanging seeds among
themselves. This has allowed them a certain degree of independence and
has enabled them to innovate, maintain biodiversity, adapt seeds to
climatic conditions and fend off plant disease. Big seed companies with
help from the Gates Foundation, the US government and other aid donors
are now discussing ways to increase their market penetration of
commercial seeds by displacing farmers own seed systems.

Corporate sold hybrid seeds often produce higher yields when first
planted, but the second generation seeds produce low yields and
unpredictable crop traits, making them unsuitable for saving and
storing. As Heidi Chow from
Global Justice Now rightly says, instead of saving seeds from their own
crops, farmers who use hybrid seeds become completely dependent on the
seed, fertiliser and pesticide companies, which can (and has) in turn
result in an agrarian crisis centred on debt, environmental damage and health problems.

The London conference aimed to share findings of a report by Monitor
Deloitte on developing the commercial seed sector in sub-Saharan Africa.
The report recommends that in countries where farmers are using their
own seed saving networks NGOs and aid donors should encourage
governments to introduce intellectual property rights for seed breeders
and help to persuade farmers to buy commercial, patented seeds rather
than relying on their own traditional varieties. The report also
suggests that governments should remove regulations so that the seed
sector is opened up to the global market.

The guest list comprised corporations, development agencies and aid
donors, including Syngenta, the World Bank and the Gates Foundation. It
speaks volumes that not one farmer organisation was invited. Farmers
have been imbued with the spirit of entrepreneurship for thousands of
years. They have been “scientists, innovators, natural resource stewards, seed savers and hybridisation experts”
who have increasingly been reduced to becoming recipients of technical
fixes and consumers of poisonous products of a growing agricultural
inputs industry. So who better than to discuss issues concerning
agriculture?

But the whole point of such a conference is that the West regards
African agriculture as a ‘business opportunity’, albeit wrapped up in
warm-sounding notions of ‘feeding Africa’ or ‘lifting millions out of
poverty’. The West’s legacy in Africa (and elsewhere) has been to plunge millions into poverty. Enforcing
structural reforms to benefit big agribusiness and its unsustainable
toxic GMO/petrochemical inputs represents a continuation of the
neo-colonialist plundering of Africa. The US has for many decades been using agriculture as a key part of foreign policy to secure global hegemony.

Phil Bereano, food sovereignty campaigner with AGRA Watch and an Emeritus Professor at the University of Washington says:

“This is an
extension of what the Gates Foundation has been doing for several years –
working with the US government and agribusiness giants like Monsanto to
corporatize Africa’s genetic riches for the benefit of outsiders. Don’t
Bill and Melinda realize that such colonialism is no longer in fashion?
It’s time to support African farmers’ self-determination.”

Bereano also shows how Western
corporations only intend to cherry-pick the most profitable aspects of
the food production chain, while leaving the public sector in Africa to
pick up the tab for the non-profitable aspects that allow profitability
further along the chain.

Giant agritech corporations with their patented seeds and associated chemical inputs are ensuring a shift away from diversified agriculture that
guarantees balanced local food production, the protection of people’s
livelihoods and agricultural sustainability. African agriculture is
being placed in the hands of big agritech for private profit under the
pretext of helping the poor. The Gates Foundation has substantial shares in Monsanto. With Monsanto’s active backingfrom the US State Department and the Gates Foundation’s links with USAID, African farmers face a formidable force.

Report after report suggests
that support for conventional agriculture, agroecology and local
economies is required, especially in the Global South. Instead, Western
governments are supporting powerful corporations with taxpayers money
whose thrust via the WTO, World Bank and IMF has been to encourage
strings-attached loans, monocrop cultivation for export using corporate
seeds, the restructuring of economies, the opening of economies to the
vagaries of land and commodity speculation and a system of globalised
trade rigged in favour of the West.

In this vision for Africa, those farmers who are regarded as having
any role to play in all of this are viewed only as passive consumers of
corporate seeds and agendas. The future of Africa is once again being
decided by rich men in London.

Oldspeak: ““For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.” -Noam Chomsky By Wesley Messamore @ Policy Mic:
Washington doesn’t merely lack the legal authority for a military
intervention in Syria. It lacks the moral authority. We’re talking about
a government with a history of using chemical weapons against innocent
people far more prolific and deadly than the mere accusations Assad faces from a trigger-happy Western military-industrial complex, bent on stifling further investigation before striking.
Here is a list of 10 chemical weapons attacks carried out by the U.S. government or its allies against civilians.

1. The U.S. Military Dumped 20 Million Gallons of Chemicals on Vietnam from 1962 – 1971

Via: AP

During the Vietnam War, the U.S. military sprayed 20 million gallons of chemicals,
including the very toxic Agent Orange, on the forests and farmlands of
Vietnam and neighboring countries, deliberately destroying food
supplies, shattering the jungle ecology, and ravaging the lives of
hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Vietnam estimates
that as a result of the decade-long chemical attack, 400,000 people
were killed or maimed, 500,000 babies have been born with birth defects,
and 2 million have suffered from cancer or other illnesses. In 2012,
the Red Cross estimated that one million people in Vietnam have disabilities or health problems related to Agent Orange.

White phosphorus is a horrific incendiary chemical weapon that melts human flesh right down to the bone.
In 2009, multiple human rights groups,
including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and International
Red Cross reported that the Israeli government was attacking civilians
in their own country with chemical weapons. An Amnesty International
team claimed to find “indisputable evidence of the widespread use of
white phosphorus” as a weapon in densely populated civilian areas. The
Israeli military denied the allegations at first, but eventually admitted they were true.
After the string of allegations by these NGOs, the Israeli military even hit a UN headquarters(!) in Gaza with a chemical attack. How do you think all this evidence compares to the case against Syria? Why didn’t Obama try to bomb Israel?

3. Washington Attacked Iraqi Civilians with White Phosphorus in 2004

Via: AP

In 2004, journalists embedded with the U.S. military in Iraq began reporting the use of white phosphorus in Fallujah against Iraqi insurgents. First the military lied and said that it was only using white phosphorus to create smokescreens or illuminate targets. Then it admitted to
using the volatile chemical as an incendiary weapon. At the time,
Italian television broadcaster RAI aired a documentary entitled,
“Fallujah, The Hidden Massacre,” including grim video footage and
photographs, as well as eyewitness interviews with Fallujah residents
and U.S. soldiers revealing how the U.S. government indiscriminately
rained white chemical fire down on the Iraqi city and melted women and
children to death.

CIA records now prove
that Washington knew Saddam Hussein was using chemical weapons
(including sarin, nerve gas, and mustard gas) in the Iran-Iraq War, yet
continued to pour intelligence into the hands of the Iraqi military,
informing Hussein of Iranian troop movements while knowing that he would
be using the information to launch chemical attacks. At one point in
early 1988, Washington warned Hussein of an Iranian troop movement that
would have ended the war in a decisive defeat for the Iraqi government.
By March an emboldened Hussein with new friends in Washington struck a Kurdish village occupied by Iranian troops with multiple chemical agents,
killing as many as 5,000 people and injuring as many as 10,000 more,
most of them civilians. Thousands more died in the following years from
complications, diseases, and birth defects.

5. The Army Tested Chemicals on Residents of Poor, Black St. Louis Neighborhoods in The 1950s

In the early 1950s, the Army set up motorized blowers on top of
residential high-rises in low-income, mostly black St. Louis
neighborhoods, including areas where as much as 70% of the residents
were children under 12. The government told residents that it was
experimenting with a smokescreen to protect the city from Russian
attacks, but it was actually pumping the air full
of hundreds of pounds of finely powdered zinc cadmium sulfide. The
government admits that there was a second ingredient in the chemical
powder, but whether or not that ingredient was radioactive remains classified.
Of course it does. Since the tests, an alarming number of the area’s
residents have developed cancer. In 1955, Doris Spates was born in one
of the buildings the Army used to fill the air with chemicals from 1953 –
1954. Her father died inexplicably that same year, she has seen four
siblings die from cancer, and Doris herself is a survivor of cervical
cancer.

6. Police Fired Tear Gas at Occupy Protesters in 2011

The savage violence of the police against Occupy protesters in 2011 was well documented, and included the use of tear gas and other chemical irritants. Tear gas is prohibited for use against enemy soldiers
in battle by the Chemical Weapons Convention. Can’t police give
civilian protesters in Oakland, California the same courtesy and
protection that international law requires for enemy soldiers on a
battlefield?

7. The FBI Attacked Men, Women, and Children With Tear Gas in Waco in 1993

At the infamous Waco siege of a peaceful community of Seventh Day Adventists, the FBI pumped tear gas
into buildings knowing that women, children, and babies were inside.
The tear gas was highly flammable and ignited, engulfing the buildings
in flames and killing 49 men and women, and 27 children, including
babies and toddlers. Remember, attacking an armed enemy soldier on a
battlefield with tear gas is a war crime. What kind of crime is
attacking a baby with tear gas?

8. The U.S. Military Littered Iraq with Toxic Depleted Uranium in 2003

Via: AP

In Iraq, the U.S. military has littered the environment with thousands of tons of munitions made from depleted uranium, a toxic and radioactive nuclear waste product. As a result, more than half of babies born in Fallujah from 2007 – 2010 were born with birth defects.
Some of these defects have never been seen before outside of textbooks
with photos of babies born near nuclear tests in the Pacific. Cancer and
infant mortality have also seen a dramatic rise in Iraq. According to Christopher Busby,
the Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk,
“These are weapons which have absolutely destroyed the genetic integrity
of the population of Iraq.” After authoring two of four reports
published in 2012 on the health crisis in Iraq, Busby described Fallujah
as having, “the highest rate of genetic damage in any population ever
studied.”

9. The U.S. Military Killed Hundreds of Thousands of Japanese Civilians with Napalm from 1944 – 1945

Napalm is a sticky and highly flammable gel which has been used as a weapon of terror by the U.S. military. In 1980, the UN declared the use of napalm on swaths of civilian population a war crime. That’s exactly what the U.S. military did
in World War II, dropping enough napalm in one bombing raid on Tokyo to
burn 100,000 people to death, injure a million more, and leave a
million without homes in the single deadliest air raid of World War II.

10. The U.S. Government Dropped Nuclear Bombs on Two Japanese Cities in 1945

Although nuclear bombs may not be considered chemical weapons, I
believe we can agree they belong to the same category. They certainly
disperse an awful lot of deadly radioactive chemicals. They are every
bit as horrifying as chemical weapons if not more, and by their very
nature, suitable for only one purpose: wiping out an entire city full of
civilians. It seems odd that the only regime to ever use one of these weapons of terror
on other human beings has busied itself with the pretense of keeping
the world safe from dangerous weapons in the hands of dangerous
governments.

Wednesday, 25 March 2015

ON A BRISK SPRING Tuesday in 1976, a pair of executives from
the Sugar Association stepped up to the podium of a Chicago ballroom to accept the Oscar of the public relations world, the Silver Anvilaward for excellence in "the forging of
public opinion." The trade group had recently pulled off one of
the greatest turnarounds in PR history. For nearly a decade, the sugar industry
had been buffeted by crisis after crisis as the media and the public soured on
sugar and scientists began to view it as a likely cause of obesity, diabetes,
and heart disease. Industry ads claiming that eating sugar helped you lose
weight had beencalled out by the Federal Trade Commission, and the Food
and Drug Administration had launched a review of whether sugar was even safe to eat.
Consumption had declined 12 percent in just two years, and producers could see
where that trend might lead. As John "JW" Tatem Jr. and Jack
O'Connell Jr., the Sugar Association's president and director of public
relations, posed that day with their trophies, their smiles only hinted at the
coup they'd just pulled off.

Their
winning campaign, crafted with the help of the prestigious public relations
firm Carl Byoir & Associates, had been prompted by a poll showing that consumers had come to see
sugar as fattening, and that most doctors suspected it might exacerbate, if not
cause, heart disease and diabetes. With an initial annual budget of nearly
$800,000 ($3.4 million today) collected from the makers of Dixie Crystals,
Domino, C&H, Great Western, and other sugar brands, the association
recruited a stable of medical and nutritional professionals to allay the
public's fears, brought snack and beverage companies into the fold, and
bankrolled scientific papers that contributed to a "highly
supportive" FDA ruling, which, the Silver Anvil application boasted, made
it "unlikely that sugar will be subject to legislative restriction in
coming years."

The
story of sugar, as Tatem told it, was one of a harmless product under attack by
"opportunists dedicated to exploiting the consuming public."
Over the subsequent decades, it would be transformed from what the New
York Times in 1977 had deemed "a villain in disguise" into a nutrient so seemingly
innocuous that even the American Heart Association and the American Diabetes
Association approved it as part of a healthy diet. Research on the suspected
links between sugar and chronic disease largely ground to a halt by the late
1980s, and scientists came to view such pursuits as a career dead end. So
effective were the Sugar Association's efforts that, to this day, no consensus
exists about sugar's potential dangers. The industry's PR campaign corresponded
roughly with a significant rise in Americans' consumption of "caloric sweeteners," including table sugar (sucrose) and
high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). This increase was accompanied, in turn, by a
surge in the chronic diseases increasingly linked to sugar. Since 1970, obesity rates in the United States have more than
doubled, while the incidence of diabetes has more than tripled. (The chart
below uses sugar "availability" numbers rather than the USDA's speculative new consumption figures.)

Precisely
how did the sugar industry engineer its turnaround? The answer is found in more
than 1,500 pages of internal memos, letters, and company board reports we discovered buried in the archives of now-defunct sugar
companies as well as in the recently released papers of deceased researchers and
consultants who played key roles in the industry's strategy. They show how Big
Sugar used Big Tobacco-style tactics to ensure that government agencies would
dismiss troubling health claims against their products. Compared to the tobacco
companies, which knew for a fact that their wares were deadly and spent
billions of dollars trying to cover up that reality, the sugar industry had a
relatively easy task. With the jury still out on sugar's health effects,
producers simply needed to make sure that the uncertainty lingered. But the
goal was the same: to safeguard sales by creating a body of evidence companies
could deploy to counter any unfavorable research.

For 40 years, the sugar
industry's priority has been to shed doubt on studies suggesting that its product
makes people sick.

This
decades-long effort to stack the scientific deck is why, today, the USDA's dietary
guidelines only speak of sugar in vague generalities.
("Reduce the intake of calories from solid fats and added sugars.")
It's why the FDA insists that sugar is "generally recognized as safe" despite considerable
evidence suggesting otherwise. It's why some scientists' urgent calls for
regulation of sugary products have been dead on arrival, and it's why—absent
any federal leadership—New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg felt compelled to
propose a ban on oversized sugary drinks that passed in September.

In
fact, a growing body of research suggests that sugar and its nearly chemically
identical cousin, HFCS, may very well cause diseases that kill hundreds of
thousands of Americans every year, and that these chronic conditions would be
far less prevalent if we significantly dialed back our consumption of added
sugars. Robert Lustig, a leading authority on pediatric obesity at the
University of California-San Francisco (whose arguments Gary explored in a 2011 New
York Times Magazinecover story), made this case last February in the prestigious
journal Nature. In an article titled "The Toxic Truth About Sugar," Lustig and two colleagues
observed that sucrose and HFCS are addictive in much the same way as cigarettes
and alcohol, and that overconsumption of them is driving worldwide epidemics of
obesity and type 2 diabetes (the type associated with obesity). Sugar-related
diseases are costing America around $150 billion a year, the authors estimated,
so federal health officials need to step up and consider regulating the stuff.

"[T]he fact that no
confirmed scientific evidence links sugar to the death-dealing diseases…is the
lifeblood" of the Sugar Association.

The
Sugar Association dusted off what has become its stock response: The Lustig
paper, it said, "lacks the scientific evidence or consensus" to
support its claims, and its authors were irresponsible not to point out that
the full body of science "is inconclusive at best." This inconclusiveness,
of course, is precisely what the Sugar Association has worked so assiduously to
maintain. "In confronting our critics," Tatem explainedto his board of directors back in 1976,
"we try never to lose sight of the fact that no confirmed scientific
evidence links sugar to the death-dealing diseases. This crucial point is the
lifeblood of the association."

THE SUGAR ASSOCIATION'Searliest
incarnation dates back to 1943, when growers and refiners
created the Sugar Research Foundation to counter World War IIsugar-rationing propaganda—"How Much Sugar Do You Need?
None!" declared one government pamphlet. In 1947, producers rechristened
their group the Sugar Association and launched a new PR division, Sugar
Information Inc., which before long was touting sugar as a "sensible new approach to weight
control." In 1968, in the hope of enlisting foreign sugar companies to
help defray costs, the Sugar Association spun off its research division as the
International Sugar Research Foundation. "Misconceptions concerning the
causes of tooth decay, diabetes, and heart problems exist on a worldwide
basis," explained a 1969 ISRF recruiting brochure.

As
early as 1962, internal Sugar Association memos had acknowledged the potential
links between sugar and chronic diseases, but at the time sugar executives had
a more pressing problem: Weight-conscious Americans were switching in droves to
diet sodas—particularly Diet Rite and Tab—sweetened with cyclamate and
saccharin. From 1963 through 1968, diet soda's share of the soft-drink market
shot from 4 percent to 15 percent. "A dollar's worth of sugar," ISRF
vice president and research director John Hickson warned in an internal review,
"could be replaced with a dime's worth" of sugar alternatives.
"If anyone can undersell you nine cents out of 10," Hickson told the New York Times in 1969, "you'd
better find some brickbat you can throw at him."

By
then, the sugar industry had doled out more than $600,000 (about $4 million
today) to study every conceivable harmful effect of cyclamate sweeteners, which
are still sold around the world under names like Sugar Twin and Sucaryl. In
1969, the FDA banned cyclamates in the United States based on a study
suggesting they could cause bladder cancer in rats. Not long after, Hickson
left the ISRF to work for the Cigar Research Council. He was described in a
confidential tobacco industry memo as a "supreme scientific
politician who had been successful in condemning cyclamates, on behalf of the
[sugar industry], on somewhat shaky evidence." It later emerged that the
evidence suggesting that cyclamates caused cancer in rodents was not relevant to humans, but by then the case was officially
closed. In 1977, saccharin, too, was nearly banned on the basis of animal
results that would turn out to be meaningless in people.

Meanwhile,
researchers had been reporting that blood lipids—cholesterol and triglycerides
in particular—were a risk factor in heart disease. Some people had high
cholesterol but normal triglycerides, prompting health experts to recommend
that they avoid animal fats. Other people were deemed "carbohydrate
sensitive," with normal cholesterol but markedly increased triglyceride
levels. In these individuals, even moderate sugar consumption could cause a
spike in triglycerides. John Yudkin, the United Kingdom's leading nutritionist,
was making headlines with claims that sugar, not fat, was the
primary cause of heart disease.

In
1967, the Sugar Association's research division began considering "the
rising tide of implications of sucrose in atherosclerosis." Before long,
according to a confidential 1970 review of industry-funded studies, the newly
formed ISRF was spending 10 percent of its research budget on the link between
diet and heart disease. Hickson, the ISRF's vice president, urged his member
corporations to keep the results of the review under wraps. Of particular
concern was the work of a University of Pennsylvania researcher on
"sucrose sensitivity," which sugar executives feared was "likely to reveal evidence of harmful effects." One ISRF
consultant recommendedthat sugar companies get to the truth of the matter
by sponsoring a full-on study. In what would become a pattern, the ISRF opted
not to follow his advice. Another ISRF-sponsored study, by biochemist Walter
Pover of the University of Birmingham, in England, had uncovered a possible
mechanism to explain how sugar raises triglyceride levels. Pover believed he
was on the verge of demonstrating this mechanism "conclusively" and
that 18 more weeks of work would nail it down. But instead of providing the
funds, the ISRF nixed the project, assessing its value as "nil."

One diabetes expert testified
that anything more than 70 pounds per person per year—about half of what is
sold in America today—might spark epidemics.

The
industry followed a similar strategy when it came to diabetes. By 1973, links
between sugar, diabetes, and heart disease were sufficiently troubling that
Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota convened a hearing of his Select Committee
on Nutrition and Human Needs to address the issue. An international panel of
experts—including Yudkin and Walter Mertz, head of the Human Nutrition
Institute at the Department of Agriculture—testified that variations in sugar
consumption were the best explanation for the differences in diabetes rates
between populations, and that research by the USDA and others supported the
notion that eating too much sugar promotes dramatic population-wide increases
in the disease. One panelist, South African diabetes specialist George
Campbell, suggested that anything more than 70 pounds per person per year—about
half of what is sold in America today—would spark epidemics.

In
the face of such hostile news from independent scientists, the ISRF hosted its
own conference the following March, focusing exclusively on the work of
researchers who were skeptical of a sugar/diabetes connection. "All those
present agreed that a large amount of research is still necessary before a firm
conclusion can be arrived at," according to a conference review published in a prominent diabetes
journal. In 1975, the foundation reconvened in Montreal to discuss research
priorities with its consulting scientists. Sales were sinking, Tatem reminded
the gathered sugar execs, and a major factor was "the impact of consumer
advocates who link sugar consumption with certain diseases."

Following
the Montreal conference, the ISRF disseminated a memo quoting Errol Marliss, a University
of Toronto diabetes specialist, recommending that the industry pursue
"well-designed research programs" to establish sugar's role in the course
of diabetes and other diseases. "Such research programs might produce
an answer that sucrose is bad in certain individuals," he warned. But the
studies "should be undertaken in a sufficiently comprehensive way as to
produce results. A gesture rather than full support is unlikely to produce the
sought-after answers."

Industry-funded science
projects were vetted by a panel with reps from Hershey's, Coca-Cola, General
Mills, and Nabisco.

A
gesture, however, is what the industry would offer. Rather than approve a
serious investigation of the purported links between sucrose and disease,
American sugar companies quit supporting the ISRF's research projects. Instead,
via the Sugar Association proper, they would spend roughly $655,000 between
1975 and 1980 on 17 studies designed, as internal documents put it, "to maintain research as a main prop of the industry's defense."
Each proposal was vetted by a panel of industry-friendly scientists and asecond committee staffed by representatives from sugar
companies and "contributing research members" such as Coca-Cola,
Hershey's, General Mills, and Nabisco. Most of the cash was awarded to
researchers whose studies seemed explicitly designed to exonerate sugar. One
even proposed to explore whether sugar could be shown to boost serotonin levels
in rats' brains, and thus "prove of therapeutic value, as in the relief of
depression," an internal document noted.

At
best, the studies seemed a token effort. Harvard Medical School professor Ron
Arky, for example, received money from the Sugar Association to determine
whether sucrose has a different effect on blood sugar and other diabetes
indicators if eaten alongside complex carbohydrates like pectin and psyllium.
The project went nowhere, Arky told us recently. But the Sugar Association
"didn't care."

In
short, rather than do definitive research to learn the truth about its product,
good or bad, the association stuck to a PR scheme designed to "establish
with the broadest possible audience—virtually everyone is a consumer—the safety
of sugar as a food." One of its first acts was to establish a Food & Nutrition Advisory Councilconsisting of a
half-dozen physicians and two dentists willing to defend sugar's place in a
healthy diet, and set aside roughly $60,000 per year (more than $220,000 today)
to cover its cost.